Online sales up 22.6% at John Lewis

  • John Lewis has reported that total sales were £734m for the five weeks to 28 December 2013, up 7.2% compared with last year, or 6.9% on a like-for-like basis.
  • Online sales for the five weeks were 22.6% up on last year with johnlewis.com accounting for 31.8% of the total John Lewis business during this period. Click & Collect orders were up 61.8% up on last year.
  • The five weeks saw a number of records fall. Black Friday (29 November) was the biggest ever day for online orders, the final pre-Christmas week (ending 21 December) broke the £160m barrier for the first time and the first day of Clearance in branches (27 December) was the biggest ever day for our shops and the business as a whole, taking £35.6m.
  • On Christmas Day, traffic from mobile phones and tablets made up three quarters of total traffic, overtaking that from desktops by a considerable margin.

UK goes shopping on Boxing Day

  • Data from Experian Hitwise shows that Boxing Day 2013 was the biggest and busiest day ever for online retailers in the UK.
  • British internet users made 129m visits to retail websites on Boxing Day, a 15% year-on-year increase, making 26 December the biggest online shopping day ever. 
  • UK consumers spent 17m hours browsing and shopping online on Boxing Day, contributing to a total of 44.3m hours shopping online across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
  • There were 90m online retail visits on Christmas Eve 2013 (up 6% year-on-year) and 114m online retail visits on Christmas Day (up 6% year-on-year).

Postcode lookups show online Christmas shopping boom

  • Data from Postcode Anywhere found that twice as many consumers headed online this Christmas Day compared to the same period last year. 
  • The firm reveals how over 1.5m addresses were captured via its online data platform on Christmas Day, compared to just 621,083 the year before. 
  • However this was eclipsed by Boxing Day where almost 3m delivery addresses were captured. This represents almost a 300% increase from the 1m addresses looked up last year.
  • Of the customers looking to validate their addresses, over 32% used either a mobile or tablet device.

IBM finds mobile and online shopping up again on Boxing Day

  • A majority of Boxing Day traffic to UK retail websites came from mobile devices, according to IBM. But while tablets drove sales, smartphones proved to be the most popular device for browsing. 
  • The IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reveals that on Thursday 26 December online sales increased by 40.4% compared to Boxing Day 2012.
  • Mobile traffic grew to 58% of all online traffic, an increase of 42% over 2012. Sales completed via mobile devices were also strong, growing 63% year over year, and exceeding 45% of total online sales.
  • Smartphones drove 29.9% of all online traffic versus tablets at 28%. When it came to making purchases, tablet users drove 29.4% of online sales, which was nearly twice that of smartphones users, who drove 15.8%. 
  • AOV (average order value) on tablets was £83.55 while AOV on all mobile phones was £78.06.

House of Fraser reports best ever Christmas sales

  • House of Fraser enjoyed its best Christmas trading period on record, driven largely by a jump in online sales.
  • Like-for-like sales for the three weeks to 28 December rose 7.3%, with online sales up by almost 57.7%.

Record-setting season for Amazon Prime

  • Amazon announced a record-setting holiday season for Amazon Prime, the annual membership program offering unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of items. 
  • More than 1m customers around the world became new Prime members in the third week of December. On Amazon’s peak shipping day, more Prime items were shipped worldwide than ever before. 
  • The entire 2013 holiday season was the best ever for Amazon, with more than 36.8m items ordered worldwide on Cyber Monday, which is a record-breaking 426 items per second.

Debenhams reports increased online sales but drop in profits

  • Retail chain Debenhams has reported that online sales increased by 27% for the 17 week period to 28 December 2013.
  • Overall online sales accounted for 15.6% of total sales compared with 12.4% for the same period last year. However, online delivery income was lower than anticipated.
  • This means that, despite the increase in commerce revenues, Debenhams’ pre-tax profits for the six months to April 2014 are expected to reach £85m, down from £115m in the same period in 2013.